1. Field
The present invention relates generally to communication, and more specifically to data transmission in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system.
2. Background
A MIMO system employs multiple (NT) transmit antennas at a transmitting entity and multiple (NR) receive antennas at a receiving entity for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the NT transmit antennas and NR receive antennas may be decomposed into NS spatial channels, where NS≦min{NT, NR}. The NS spatial channels may be used to transmit data in parallel to achieve higher throughput and/or redundantly to achieve greater reliability.
Each spatial channel may experience various deleterious channel conditions such as, e.g., fading, multipath, and interference effects. The NS spatial channels may also experience different channel conditions and may achieve different signal-to-noise-and-interference ratios (SNRs). The SNR of each spatial channel determines its transmission capacity, which is typically quantified by a particular data rate that may be reliably transmitted on the spatial channel. For a time variant wireless channel, the channel conditions change over time and the SNR of each spatial channel also changes over time. The different SNRs for different spatial channels plus the time varying nature of the SNR for each spatial channel make it challenging to efficiently transmit data in a MIMO system.
If the transmitting entity has knowledge of the channel condition, then it may transmit data in a manner to more fully utilize the transmission capacity of each spatial channel. However, if the transmitting entity does not know the channel condition, then it may need to transmit data at a low rate so that the data transmission can be reliably decoded by the receiving entity even with the worst-case channel condition. Performance would then be dictated by the expected worst-case channel condition, which is highly undesirable.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to efficiently transmit data in a MIMO system.